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september 11th was a beautiful day
Sep. 11th, 2003 12:26 amI shouldn't read at work, mostly because I should be doing certifications and earning my paycheck. But above all, I shouldn't be reading the New York Times or the Washington Post, and the layered sections given over to 9/11 coverage. I shouldn't, because reading any of it will wind me for hours. I'll cry, and have to make it look like my eyes are watering because the plat maps are too small to read.
But I can't look away. I can't. I have this sense of obligation, not to the media or the people or even to myself, but an obligation to history. This moment requires witnesses, and by choice or default I will be one of them. I can't even explain why this is important to me, and I don't think I've ever told anyone about it before. It's one of the reasons I wanted to live forever when I was a kid, to watch history come into being and to keep it even when everyone else might forget. I have always believed first in the things I can see, the things I can touch, put together and take apart, and maybe that is where this comes from. Keeping the fabric of the universe together in my own small way.
When I was young, my mother would show me the papers she saved from the day Kennedy died. I remember her folding away the paper with the huge cover photo of that lonely figure before a tank, which has never stopped breaking my heart. I remember watching the news breaking of the Berlin Wall and the first war in Iraq, and wishing that I was old enough to really feel it or know what it meant to have a moment that would be a touchstone for an entire generation. There was a time when I thought the closest I might ever come to that was Kurt Cobain's suicide. And then there was September 11th, 2001.
Someone was as cynical and well read as myself shouldn't even have the nerve to be shocked that it actually happened, though there is a huge difference between knowledge and experience. I remembered the conversation several years ago in the journalism room after hours, about terrorism and crashing planes into cities and our jaded teenage sense of superiority in coming up with something no one had done yet. You know, it's a funny thing to be as cynical as I am, and find yourself weeping at your desk in the middle of the night because you're listening to an audio file of a man talking about his dead son.
I sit up at night from time to time thinking about the people on the planes, and what their last moments were like, because that's a scene straight out of my worst nightmares. More than anything else about September 11th, that haunts me.
I have nothing new to say here. I have nothing more profound than some of the things I've read already. Just this is me, and I was here, and I saw it on television.
But I can't look away. I can't. I have this sense of obligation, not to the media or the people or even to myself, but an obligation to history. This moment requires witnesses, and by choice or default I will be one of them. I can't even explain why this is important to me, and I don't think I've ever told anyone about it before. It's one of the reasons I wanted to live forever when I was a kid, to watch history come into being and to keep it even when everyone else might forget. I have always believed first in the things I can see, the things I can touch, put together and take apart, and maybe that is where this comes from. Keeping the fabric of the universe together in my own small way.
When I was young, my mother would show me the papers she saved from the day Kennedy died. I remember her folding away the paper with the huge cover photo of that lonely figure before a tank, which has never stopped breaking my heart. I remember watching the news breaking of the Berlin Wall and the first war in Iraq, and wishing that I was old enough to really feel it or know what it meant to have a moment that would be a touchstone for an entire generation. There was a time when I thought the closest I might ever come to that was Kurt Cobain's suicide. And then there was September 11th, 2001.
Someone was as cynical and well read as myself shouldn't even have the nerve to be shocked that it actually happened, though there is a huge difference between knowledge and experience. I remembered the conversation several years ago in the journalism room after hours, about terrorism and crashing planes into cities and our jaded teenage sense of superiority in coming up with something no one had done yet. You know, it's a funny thing to be as cynical as I am, and find yourself weeping at your desk in the middle of the night because you're listening to an audio file of a man talking about his dead son.
I sit up at night from time to time thinking about the people on the planes, and what their last moments were like, because that's a scene straight out of my worst nightmares. More than anything else about September 11th, that haunts me.
I have nothing new to say here. I have nothing more profound than some of the things I've read already. Just this is me, and I was here, and I saw it on television.